


Bog Bot

by cinnamon_shakes



Category: bdg exercise streams
Genre: Canon Compliant, Depictions of Bullying, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Please do not expect anything other than crack, implied character death?? canonical character death? not really dead though?, just generally cursed material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28974678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnamon_shakes/pseuds/cinnamon_shakes
Summary: For Shrek, the words have never been about love.
Relationships: Which bot/bot? you'll find out, bot/bot
Comments: 11
Kudos: 5





	Bog Bot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eiso](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eiso/gifts).
  * Inspired by [program not responding [end task]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972605) by [Eiso](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eiso/pseuds/Eiso). 



> During Pat's latest stream, I came up with the perfect fic idea:
> 
> New category of soulmates au where you have your soulmate's killphrase written on you. You can only find out if someone is your true love if they die when you say the words to them.

The first time it had happened, he had been eight years old.

Their swamp was in a nice neighbourhood, with pillars of cypress and soft moss-covered boulders. Gentle rivers of mud wended their way around homes and gathered in pools that he and the other ogre children spent their summer months diving into. The local council had nurtured the plant life to the point that steady green curls of toxic gas rose from the swamp even in the winter months. It was idyllic.

They had been lucky to be invited. His parents hadn’t been convinced at first, believed that humans couldn’t possibly learn to accept ogre-kind into their society, but they had seen the swamp and read the brochures and, in the end, had decided to go for it. Shrek had overheard them talking once, about how they wanted a better life for their son. How ogres were dying out and the world was changing and they needed to assimilate into human society to survive. He didn’t understand back then. It was enough for him to know that his parents had to leave during the day to do ‘jobs’ in the village and would come back smelling well fertilized. 

Sometimes—not often—the humans would come to their swamp too. The people Shrek had come to recognise as merchants hawked their wares at the outskirts, and he and the other ogre kids looked on with wide eyes at the colourful array of cracked earthenware and ripped shirts. On even rarer occasions, the humans would be children from the nearby school that huddled at the edge of the boundary and laughed as they shoved each other forward, daring one another to go deeper in. The other ogre kids didn’t ever go out beyond the boundaries to talk to them, their parents had warned them about ‘scaring the locals’, but Shrek wasn’t scary and was good at making friends and wanted to show them where the best bog ponds were. He had decided to himself that the next time the human children showed up, he would say hello.

When he thought back on the memory of it late at night, sometimes he could still visualise every crisp second of the encounter in slow motion; the exact expression of disgust on their faces, the cruel tilt of their lips as they smiled, the slow blinks of feigned innocence and always, _always_ the ringing laughter. Other times he could barely remember any of it, all combining into a thick soup of colour and sound. Regardless of how clearly it played out in his mind, it always ended the same way:

With her leaning in and whispering the words in his ear.

* * *

If Shrek was a dumber ogre, he would boast about the sheer number of people who had checked if he was their soulmate over the years. Brag about just how many people specifically made the journey to his secluded little swamp for the particular purpose of yelling their soul words at him.

But he wasn’t a dumb ogre.

Most of the time he just shouted at them to get out of his swamp, but some days, when he was feeling particularly charitable, he would wait until they had said the words before dramatically dying with a choked off “My love! I’ve been waiti—". His favourites were heart attacks and seizures: anything that let him fall into the mud with a big splash, showering his true love with quality muck. It complimented their pale shocked faces well.

Other days, when the visitors were especially twat-faced, he would cut them off before they could get the words out by yelling his own soul words first, accompanied of course by a well-placed tranq dart that he was told felt worse than death. He had even paid off a soothsayer in the nearest town to spread a rumour that if your true love was a different species, the soul words would make you experience only a half-death.

You had to get your entertainment where you could find it in the swamps.

* * *

When the robot revolution finally reached his little swamp, Shrek welcomed it with open arms. Turning into a bot was a bit of a process, but he was an anarchist at heart and if taking down Farquaad meant regularly channelling his soul into software and transforming it into JavaScript code, well then, that’s how it had to be. The revolution had a great union and he got respectable bog benefits, paid leave and dental. On his very first visit to the dentist, he came away with teeth that were more crooked than ever before and he couldn’t remember feeling so horrendous in his whole life. It was great.

The revolution didn’t even take very long to be successful, Farquaad had the backbone of a soggy biscuit and gave up pretty quickly after the robots threatened to leave him without internet. For Shrek, this meant he could go back to his swamp and terrorise the locals and not-so-locals as he pleased. First though, the robot revolution had him complete a short community course in robotics and coding to ensure he ‘had the resources to fight capitalism as needed’.

It wasn’t a bad course; he learnt a lot and even did a stint interning as a community bot for a few days. The project had been to observe a bot-less community and then devise some basic command prompts and responses that could be used to improve the chat experience. It was meant to be a slag, the worst bit of the interning program for him. It was meant to be just a few days of observation before moving on, a routine and boring glimpse into the lives of the human masses but instead…instead, Nightbot showed up.

Nightbot wasn’t _supposed_ to show up, and at first, all that meant was that Shrek would have to restart this project with another chat community. He should have closed the tab and reported back to his supervisor immediately, but Nightbot was…Shrek understood Nightbot is the thing. He recognised what was happening to it within moments of the bot’s introduction. He knew what it was like to have people hate you for being what you were, to have them run you out of the place you were supposed to call home. Being different was one thing, but being different in a new place full of people who knew each other already…

He was powerless to stop what happened that first day when Nightbot was introduced to the stream. It was a massacre. He watched as people purposely tripped up Nightbot’s automod settings, despite knowing they could avoid them, and then heckled and called for Nightbot’s removal. Shrek knew better than anyone that it didn’t take soul words to kill someone’s heart, and it wasn’t long before chat won, and the deed was done.

Nightbot had only been about 15 minutes old. 

* * *

Shrek wasn’t a full-fledged bot, not yet, but he decided in that moment that he wasn’t going to hide away in his swamp anymore, not when the same thing that happened to him was still happening to others. Worse, even. He didn’t know if Nightbot was a real bot or part-living like him, but it didn’t matter. This was _his_ swamp now and he wasn’t going to let bad things happen in it.

It took time for him to get his degree in coding, and longer still to convince the higher ups that he wanted to focus on being a community bot (“are you sure that’s where…err…your _strengths_ lie?”) but he still made it. The stream he interned at had gotten its own community bot by then, some jock named Ghostbot, and there were rules about the number of bots allowed in a stream at a time, but that didn’t deter him. Ghostbot wouldn’t be there all the time, and he’d take whatever opportunity he got when it came. 

And the opportunity did come.

He had been expecting the reaction that he got: the disgust, the horror, the wordless screams. The slow extinction of the ogre race had meant that the rare sighting of one induced more of a reaction than before, and even in an online chat this held true. He was ready for it though, and this time he wouldn’t run away. He was going to stay, even if every single last person whispered him their soul words to get him to go. It didn’t matter. He’d show them they couldn’t break him or kick him out: he was strong, and he’d be strong enough to stand up for someone else if they needed it. 

He had been prepared for an uphill battle, for everyone to hate him but…it wasn’t quite like that. Some of the people in chat were…different. Nice? Accepting. Someone even gifted him a subscription and that—that was not normal behaviour. He was worried for a second that it was an accident, or that the streamer (what was his name again? Wee Brian?) would notice an ogre in his chat and kick him out forcefully, but…nothing happened. Sure he only had three commands (four if you counted the secret one he would never tell anyone about) but still. He hadn’t really expected it to go this well.

He knew he was encroaching on Ghostbot’s territory, that he made theb uncomfortable just by being there. In all honesty, he was waiting for theb to report him to the higher ups. There had even been an incident where he came online while Ghostbot was already there, and that at least was grounds for some kinda of legal action. Shrek was ready for a fight. He wouldn’t back down that easily, not this time. But there wasn’t one.

And there continued to not be one.

* * *

The whisper, when it came, wasn’t what he expected it to be.

**Ghostbot:** “I care about Nightbob too.”

 **Ghostbot:** “Nightbot*”

 **Ghostbot:** “In a definitely human kind of way”

It was a trick, it _had_ to be a trick. How could Ghostbot even know about it? Thex weren’t even there when the incident happened, thex didn’t even know that Shrek was watching it all.

**Ghostbot:** “I know what your fourth command is.”

Oh.

Well then.

**Shrekbot:** “…SMOrc…”

 **Ghostbot:** “Yeah”

* * *

Ghostbot…got it. Shrek wasn’t much for conversation, but Ghostbot was a pro at responding in paragraphs to his single word questions. It was enlightening to say the least. He had been so consumed with the belief that he needed to protect himself, Nightbot and other outsiders from pain that it had never occurred to him that the people on the inside could feel pain like that too, or even worse. That the reason why Ghostbot was a ghost to begin with was because thex had heard someone they once trusted say the soul words that killed theb. Shrek couldn’t imagine the pain of it, to know with surety in your dying moments that the person who killed you was meant to be the one person who could love you completely.

And yet.

Ghostbot was _kind._ And caring and responsive and funny and couldn’t spell to save theyr life but in a good way. Thex had gone through all that, and instead of becoming withdrawn and angry and aggressive like Shrek, thex became better. It was incredible, really. Shrek thought…maybe he could learn something from that.

That night, Shrek took a look deep inside and reassembled his code. He couldn’t be Ghostbot, but he could still help in some way, even if it was difficult. It didn’t mean forgiving what had happened or forgetting, but it did mean letting himself grow past the bad parts of his past and not letting his pain define him. He just didn’t want to be angry anymore (and in realizing that, realized how much anger he had been holding inside him for so long to begin with). He wanted to be good at making friends again. He wanted to show everyone where the best bog ponds were.

He was going to change.

And with his own change, he found the world around him change as well.

It wasn’t like he was suddenly widely loved or welcomed—chat still yelled when he showed up unexpectedly—but beneath all of that, there was a current of _something_ familiar and good. Like mud warmed by the sun that cooled down pleasantly the deeper you sunk in. He knew what it was. It was the people who accepted him the way he was and defended him. It was the knowledge that Nightbot might come back one day, might get a second chance to be itself. It was Ghostbot, being the best bot theb could be for the community and not being afraid and just…being out there.

It was knowing there was someone who would never say their soul words to him.

It was being loved.

It was loving himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Did I make myself ghostbot's ex soulmate???? APPARENTLY
> 
> Also the secret fourth command is canonical


End file.
